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| Image by Reinhardt Sobye |
May I speak to you in the name of the one, holy, and living
God. Amen.
Do you remember when you lost your sense of innocence? We often think of the loss of innocence as a
marker of the transition from childhood to adulthood, a move from naiveté to
sophistication and, too frequently, cynicism.
Often that loss of innocence involves an encounter with suffering and
loss or, even, what we could only describe as evil.
I’ve been watching my son struggling with this
transition. One of his senior year
electives is a course on World Affairs, focusing on critical engagement with
current events. For his first paper in
the class, Nehemiah chose to research human trafficking. Now, Nehemiah is a pretty pollyanish kind of
guy – he doesn’t like to acknowledge bad news.
So, it has been a real challenge for him to read books like David
Batstone’s Not for Sale and try to
make sense of a world that includes boy soldiers in Uganda, girl sex slaves in
Bangkok, and slave laborers in Florida.
At one point he said to me, “Pop, I can only read a little bit of this
at a time.” “Then just read a little bit
at a time,” I said. “And keep dancing.”
The trick in navigating this transition is to lose one’s
sense of innocence without losing one’s sense of wonder. Can we hold our awareness of suffering within
a larger awareness of joy? What sustains
our wonder so that we can respond with compassion rather than despair? The loss of innocence is not so much about
moving from childhood into adulthood, as it is about letting go of what is
superficial and transient, and falling into a deeper, more abiding trust in
God.
In that sense, “the loss of innocence” isn’t a one-time
event. It is an ongoing process of
moving through suffering and loss to new life.
And sometimes, when it encompasses an entire community – such as Beirut
and Paris this weekend – it can feel like the end of the world.[1]
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus urges his disciples not to
be too fascinated by the great Temple in Jerusalem. It isn’t going to last. This must have come as quite a shock to
them. These country bumpkins from
Galilee, goggle-eyed in the big city, could not help but be impressed by the
grandeur and solidity of this edifice to sacred sacrifice. The Temple was a combination of divine abode,
national bank, and center of political power.
The fact that the Temple was indeed razed to the ground by
Roman armies in the year 70 – a fact
well known by the earliest hearers of Mark’s Gospel, many of whom were probably
refugees from the disaster – only underscores the urgency of Jesus’ words. For Jews of Jesus’ generation, the
destruction of the Temple really was the end of the world. It is hard for us to imagine just how
significant the destruction of Jerusalem was for them, tantamount to Washington,
D.C. – including the White House, the National Cathedral, and the Federal
Reserve Bank – being blown apart all at once.
Mark’s Gospel is addressed to a traumatized community. Everything they knew, everything they thought
was stable and dependable, had been shattered.
And in the midst of the end of the world, we hear the voice of Jesus
saying, “The Temple will not last.
Civilizations, nations, come and go.
These things are transient. Don’t
be fascinated by them. They are not
worthy of your ultimate trust. You need
to build your life on a much more enduring foundation.”[2]
It is so easy to be mesmerized by Temples built on coercive
power, and even easier to become fascinated by the destructive power that
brings them down. Jesus tells us not to
pay too much attention to any of that.
The wars and rumors of wars and disasters that fill the headlines are the
least interesting part of the story.
They are just the birth pangs of a new beginning.
The traumatized refugees listening to Jesus’ words understood
what he is talking about. They lived in a world in which 70% of women who lived
past childhood died while giving birth or due to related complications. They knew suffering and loss, but they also knew
that it can be the harbinger of new life. The coming of birth pangs signals that
the new is coming: someone is about to be born, and in the joy of that birth we
are all reborn.
Life wants to live.
It is wondrous. God is the God of
life, and it is our trust in the gift of life, and the love that animates this
gift, that sustains us through the birth pangs.
Last weekend, Sarah Montoya brought her four-month old
daughter to the parish retreat at the Bishop’s Ranch. She was passed around from person to person
like a sacrament, a visible sign of invisible grace. Holding Walden Mae was, for me, to be
absolutely absorbed by the wonder and joy of life, providing an unshakable
touchstone of God’s gracious and loving desire for all of creation. It may be the end of the world, but as Michael
Stipe sang, I felt fine.[3]
Jesus is not oblivious to suffering and loss. He is resolutely and actively opposed to the
evil powers of every age. But Jesus does
not allow himself to become fascinated by those powers. He is fully united with the creative power of
God’s love, completely absorbed with its life-giving vitality. He entrusts himself unreservedly to the the
flow of this love, rather than to the transient edifices of coercive power in
which we too often place our trust. He
doesn’t pay any attention to them. He
moves through the birth-pangs of the New Creation, through Holy Week and Good
Friday to the Empty Tomb. Life wants to
live.
The endlessly creative ways in which life continually bursts
through the shattered remnants of our Temples, Jesus names “the realm of
God.” It is the space of freedom and joy
in which love rules. It is all around
us. We’re just too focused on trying to
hold up the wobbly pillars of our Temples, too afraid of the end of the world,
to welcome the new life that is being born.
Jesus described this kingdom or realm of God with many
evocative metaphors: the leaven that
makes the bread rise, an invasive weed that takes over the garden, a precious
pearl hidden in the field. I would like
to suggest another image: the realm of God is like a fungus.
When we think of fungi, we often picture mushrooms. But the mushroom is merely the fruit of the
mycelium, an underground network of rootlike fibers that can stretch for
miles. The mycelia transmit information
across their huge networks using the same chemical neurotransmitters found in
our brains. They breath in oxygen and
exhale carbon dioxide. In fact, the
largest known organism in the world is a mycelial mat or network in eastern
Oregon that covers 2,200 acres and is more than 2,000 years old.
What is interesting about mycelia is their symbiotic
relationship with their environment. The
fungi’s fine filaments absorb nutrients from the soil, even breaking down rocks
to extract minerals, and exchanges them for some of the energy that plants
produce through photosynthesis. The
mycelium supporting a forest community will transmit this energy from one part
of a forest to another to keep the ecosystem healthy; for example, from plants
along a riverbank getting plenty of sunlight, to plants in the underbrush who
need it. They change literal stones
into metaphorical bread for trees and other plants. They even function to slowly metabolize the
radioactive waste in Chernobyl into non-lethal materials, so that the
surrounding ecosystem can heal and grow again.[4]
The realm of God is like mycelium: transforming death into
life - willingly enduring what seems like the end of the world for the sake of
a larger wholeness. Mycelium have nodes
of crossing as part of their “architecture,” branches that allow them to choose
an alternative route to regrow when they experience breakage or an
infection. There is no single point in
the mycelial network that can bring the whole thing down. Destroy part of it, and it just keeps
growing. Life wants to live.
The realm of God is like fungi: underground, beneath the
radar, relentlessly transforming death into life, sharing what is needful to
maintain the common good, metabolizing the poison of our culture. Our Temples crumble, but the mycelia keep on
renewing the face of the earth.
This morning, we will baptize Virginia LeBlanc into the Body
of Christ, into the realm of God: the newest fungus among us! It is a kind of anticipatory “loss of
innocence.” It is an inoculation against
the fascination with coercive power that brings death, that doesn’t last, so
that she may become united with the creative power of God’s love that makes all
things new. In celebrating her new
birth, we will all be renewed. Amen.
[1]
Terrorist attacks left 43 people dead in Beirut and 129 people in Paris, with
many still in critical condition.
[2]
Mark 13:1-8.
[3]
Bill Berry, Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, & Michael Mills, “It’s
The End Of The World As We Know It,” (Night Garden Music, 1987).
[4]
Derrick Jensen, “Going Underground: Paul
Stamets On The Vast, Intelligent Network Beneath Our Feet,” The Sun (February 2008, Issue 386).
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